From the Forum — Issue #29

Welcome to the latest installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.

1. Rotating a large group

Taking a look around the CoronaLabs forums reveals a fair amount of questions about display groups. It can take a few minutes to wrap your head around exactly how they work. Essentially, they are hybrid tables and they’re absolutely necessary to create logical scenes.

Distinguished Corona evangelist Ed Maurina (RoamingGamer) has come up with a nifty method of rotating a group of objects around a central point. This snippet could be useful to replicate planetary rotation or even achieve a unique storybook transition.

2. X-ray functionality without the mask

For as long as humankind can remember, we’ve struggled to see what is underneath things without actually moving them. Dirt, rocks, skin… the list of things we want to see below goes on and on. The methods in real life vary, and Corona is no exception.

While masks are useful for this take, that can become slightly cumbersome. “Friend of the Forum”™Ksan posed this question to the development community and Corona developer jandjstudiosllc responded with an interesting workaround that incorporates the “iris” filter to reveal one object underneath another object.

Head on over to the original thread to learn how this can work for you:

3. Moses from Roland

If you’re not following Lua genius Roland Yonaba on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RYonaba) you’re doing yourself a disservice. He always has some fantastic tips about general Lua theory and Lua game development in specific. Recently, he posted a notice about his new Lua module called, simply, Moses. In Roland’s own words:

“Moses is a Lua library mostly meant for functional programming, with Lua. It provides functions to operates on tables array-style, list-style, collection-style or object-style.”

The following forum thread contains a bunch of examples where Moses would come in handy, focusing on data maintenance and table querying. It’s a great resource and well-documented, so check out the original thread which includes GitHub links to code and tutorials.

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Software, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancsoftware. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!